Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
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Friday, May 27, 2016

You can really distort and misrepresent something by taking words out of context. A good example is Eisenhower's "Farewell Address," delivered three days before leaving the White House, on January 17, 1961. The speech has been misinterpreted by many as a criticism of the "military-industrial complex," which became a key phrase in the speech in later years. When someone wants to add some political weight to a critique of the oppressive and increasingly expensive military establishment, oftentimes "Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex" is invoked.

This by-now-hoary political trope is based mostly on a single sentence in a single speech given as Eisenhower was LEAVING office, which various progressives and soft-headed peaceniks mindlessly invoke. Here's the Great Sentence:

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex." [As if maybe it was unsought!] [He stumbles over the word "guard." I don't know whether that was a Freudian slip of some kind, or just that even reading off a teleprompter he has poor diction.]

This from a guy who helped build up that very "complex" in many ways. And the global gestapo of the U.S. too. (And is guilty of some of the most notorious crimes of the U.S., as I enumerate below. Crimes regularly decried by those very same intellectually-lazy alleged progressives who invoke Eisenhower approvingly. Or Eisenhower's one sentence, more accurate to say.) Eisenhower didn't even say the "complex" HAD too much "influence," much less too much power. Just be alert in case it gets to be too influential.

Some warning.

If various political ninnies, who are so desperate for the imprimatur of an imperialist establishment figure to attach to their opposition to the monstrosity that is the Pentagon machine, that they have latched onto this misleading Eisenhower trope, ever took the time to listen to the actual speech, they might notice something very obvious. Eisenhower is DEFENDING the "military industrial complex." He goes on at length justifying the necessity of it. But perhaps realizing that the Leviathan he'd helped build up was a democracy-chewing beast, he kicked the can down the road and plopped it into the laps the public at large and his successors to keep an eye out for it. [1]

Gee, thanks a million for the heads-up, man. Hey maybe the most powerful man in the world should have done something about it!

But it was already much too late for that. The spawning of this evil cancer began with Truman, who also helped create the CIA. Less than 3 years after Eisenhower tossed his warning over his shoulder as he skedaddled, the CIA, with help from the FBI and the military, bumped off his successor, Kennedy. The state within the state was the real, and unassailable power now. Democracy was well and truly dead in America, show elections notwithstanding.

Policy was to be made by the mighty military-secret police state, and presidents went along with that almost entirely. Yes, some presidents hold back the leash of the U.S. attack dog at times, but mostly head in the direction the attack dog wants to go. (This describes Obama to a T.) Presidents are encouraged in this by the ideological superstructure, all those "respectable" institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, the so-called "think tanks," the Washington foundations, that cannot imagine a non-imperialist line. All the "experts" agree that the U.S. must dominate the world, by force if necessary, and impose exploitative corporate capitalism everywhere, destroying the indigenous capitalisms of target nations in the process. All they argue about is the specific plots and plans, the best strategies and tactics to achieve this or that end.

The truth is that some of the very worst crimes of U.S. imperialism committed in the 20th century were ordered by Eisenhower, and the destructive legacy of those criminal acts hobble nations and cause suffering to people to this very day.

Here's Eisenhower's actual record:

-Increased the U.S. arsenal of nuclear warheads from about 1,200 to over 22,000. That's an increase of over 18 times.

-Overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iran in 1953, installed the Shah, who became the worse dictator in the world until his overthrow 26 years later. Iran has still never recovered its democracy, and now suffers under a theocracy. The Shah effectively wiped out any possible opposition except from organized religion, directly leading to the result we see today. This was done by his murderous, sadistic secret police SAVAK, under the guidance of its mentor and guide, the CIA. (The coup was motivated by oil, but as was standard procedure, the Communist Threat was used as justification.)

-Overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954 to benefit one U.S. banana company, installing a bloodthirsty fascist military dictatorship that murdered a quarter million Guatemalans over the next four decades, and today is still a lethal rightwing hellhole. (Here again, a spurious charge of Communist Takeover averted was drummed up by propagandists for public consumption.)

-Here's a nice one: he authorized military-style roundups and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of of Mexicans in 1954. The mass Israeli-style deportation was officially named Operation Wetback, a nice racist touch. (But Eisenhower was a decent guy, we're told.)

-He oversaw the worst period of post World War II purges and domestic repression, initiated under Truman, a campaign of political "cleansing" and enforced ideological conformity lasting for about a decade and a half and misleadingly called "McCarthyism," so the bourgeoisie can blame it all on one Senator and dismiss it as some kind of aberration. (All the periods of heightened repression in U.S. history somehow are just aberrations. Same with the atrocities, the murders, the genocides, slavery, lethal attacks on labor organizers and protesters, ghoulish medical "experiments" apparently inspired by the behavior of Nazi concentration camp doctors, and so on and on. All the bad stuff only proves how good America really is. Because as the current Emperor constantly tells us, "That's not who we are!" Must be some body double nation doing it.)

-Oh yeah, he executed the Rosenbergs. That doesn't stop lefties from thinking Eisenhower was some kind of Good Guy.

-He also split Vietnam in two and prevented its unification by barring the elections agreed to in the accords that ended French colonial rule there, and established a U.S. cllient dictatorship in the southern half of the divided country. (1954 again. Busy year for The General!) The outcome? Ultimately the U.S. dropped 6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, three times the tonnage it dropped in World War II. It poisoned the soil and water with deadly dioxins, leading to cancers and monstrous birth defects even today. In other words, it vandalized the very genome of the Vietnamese people. It caused the immediate deaths of at least 3 million Vietnamese, committed innumerable horrific atrocities, and killed another million Cambodians and Laotians combined. Nixon's war on Cambodia destabilized that small, vulnerable nation and led to the Khmer Rouge taking over Cambodia and murdering millions more Cambodians. (It's not for nothing that the U.S. is called the Super Bully Nation.)

-Set in train the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (another booby-trap he handed off to his successor, like Vietnam), and initiated the 56 year long war against Cuba, which included innumerable acts of terrorism.

-And whatever else I've left out- which is a lot.

1] You don't have to take my word for what he said. Listen to the speech yourself! Here's the televised "Farewell Address," as some like to call it, of Dwight David Eisenhower.

I exaggerated a bit when I said it was just one sentence. After the money sentence are a few more sentences along the lines of a warning. The bulk of the speech is a defense of the peacetime "large armaments industry" and bulked-up peacetime military, which he claims is "new" under his presidency. In other words, the "military industrial complex" was created during his regime. He says of this complex:

"We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions," he says, before rolling out the sentence about being on guard against "unwarranted influence" of the m-i-c. He further defends the m-i-c.,"we recognize the imperative need for this development." Much of the address is a defense and justification of the m-i-c., contrary to how peaceniks have spun the speech. It's also larded with the standard U.S. bullshit about liberty, freedom, democracy, working for the good of people everywhere, all those sickening lies that are the direct opposite of what they actually do, as the examples I cited above amply demonstrate. He "prays" that "all the peoples of the world" get to experience "freedom" and an end to "poverty." (Instead of praying, he could have just refrained from imposing a fascist terror state on Guatemala, for example.)

Speaking of using words out of context for one's own political ends, environmentalists missed a chance to take some of the words of the speech to add "authority" to conservation. Eisenhower cautions against being too rapacious in using resources instead of husbanding them.

One possibly telling moment occurs near the beginning, in the single sentence dealing with his newly-elected successor. After a couple of words, he abruptly stops, and reaches for his throat, like he's clutching. Then he wishes the "new President...Godspeed." He never says Kennedy's name.
It's actually a terribly dull speech, poorly delivered. But you can judge it for yourself.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Certain more-thoughtful precincts of the U.S. elites occasionally fret over how to square the circle of glaring U.S. contradictions. This phenomenon gets manifested from time to time in New York Times articles that reveal more of reality than is standard in that publication, sometimes with sympathy for some victims, but that generally end with a throwing-up-of-hands attitude, at a loss for a solution.

Such an article was published today on the Times' website. [1]

The contradiction in question this time concerns the fact that Turkey and the U.S. have been operating at cross-purposes, to say the least, in Syria. The most effective fighting force against ISIS and the other Islamofascists (the main enemy of the U.S. in Syria, as the U.S. government sees it) are the Kurds.

But Turkey is waging war on the Kurds, both in Syria and in Turkey. Even in Iraq, in fact, where it has attacked Kurds.

And Turkey is even backing some of the Islamofascists.

But Turkey is a member of the U.S.-created-and-dominated military alliance, NATO. And has key military bases that the U.S. uses, particularly air bases, from which the U.S. is now flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. (Turkey has been a key base for U.S. espionage and military activities since World War II. Turkey was the base from which many U-2 spyplane flights were launched over the Soviet Union. The CIA ran a fake defector program against the Soviet Union from Turkey. One of those well-prepared fake defectors was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.)

It's as if such articles are throat-clearing exercises to get the attention of the executive managers of U.S. imperialism. Like a tap on the shoulder saying "What are you going to do about this?"

The article doesn't explicitly say what I stated in the title of this essay. That would be too disruptive. The New York Times only very rarely engages in boat-rocking. But the following excerpts show that my title is true.

All emphases that follow are mine.

"Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias [aka 'terrorists' as designated by theU.S.] to attack them."

"Islamist militias" are what are usually called "terrorists" in the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government. The Times discreetly avoids naming the actual "militias" it is referring to.

The U.S. designates the fighting groups in Syria it thinks are okay as the "moderate" ones.The "Islamist" ones, like the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk, are the "terrorists."

Of course, for the New York Times, it is literally unthinkable that Turkey is breaking U.S. law by "providing material support to terrorists," or that Turkey should be on the State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism."

Or at least, they don't want anyone reading the New York Times to have such thoughts cross their minds.

Then there's the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites- the same crimes the U.S. and European medias are so exercised about (rightly, if hypocritically) when ISIS does it.

The article makes plain that Kurdish towns and cities are being systematically leveled by Turkish army artillery and tank shelling.

"In Diyarbakir [Turkey], the capital of a largely Kurdish province, [Turkish] artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran."
The author also describes the destruction of Cizre by Turkish shelling, and that a similar fate awaits the surrounded and besieged city of Nusaybin:

"...it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I."

Again, the obvious similarity to ISIS crimes is overlooked.

One difference between ISIS and the Erdogan regime of Turkey is that ISIS makes a point of publicizing its crimes, as it takes a perverse pride in them. It sees its destruction and murders as making ideological points. The Turks, on the other hand, ban journalists from the cities they are laying waste to. Typical of states, they seek to hide their crimes, clumsily, from the rest of the world. (The Times reporter had to do some sneaking around to get the story. Which is fine.)

It's not just in Turkey that the U.S. has tied itself up in a ball of contradictions. The same is the case with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Afghanistan. In all these cases, its "allies" are part of the problem, indeed the root of the problem in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On top of all its strategic incoherent, the U.S. slathers a thick layer of incredibly hypocritical, self-righteous, moralistic rhetoric about "terrorism" and "freedom," and applies draconian laws (and assassinations) in extremely selective, biased fashion. This rotten ideological crust is supposed to hide the political incoherence from public view.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously yesterday for the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA).The bill would limit sovereign immunity so as to allow lawsuits against foreign states for injuries, death and damages inside the U.S. stemming from a tort, including acts of terrorism, committed anywhere by a foreign state or official. It now has to pass the House of Representatives. U.S. president Barack "DroneMan" Obama will veto it, as he insists he will. (He's true to his word when it's doing something bad.) Then the Congress will have to pass it again by at least a two-thirds majority in each chamber for the act to become law. This will enable the families of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi government in U.S. courts, where so far sovereign immunity has shielded the Saudis from civil liability (and possible imposition of monetary damage awards) for their complicity in the attacks.

We see Obama once again protecting the Bush regime, as he did on the matter of torture. As I explained in my previous essay, dragging into public view the Saudi government role in the 9/11/01 atrocity threatens to pull the submerged role of the fascist Deep State out of the black lagoon where it lies hidden.

Obama of course is also a great friend of the Saudis, authorizing the sale of billions of dollars worth of U.S. weapons to them to wage their war in Yemen. Obama also has the U.S. military aiding the Saudi war effort by providing U.S. aerial tankers to refuel the Saudis' jets, and resupplying the munitions (including cluster bombs) the Saudis are dropping on homes, hospitals, clinics, markets, mosques, and the occasion armed Houthi tribesmen. (Over 3,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed by the Saudi-Gulf-State-U.S. war coalition so far, says the UN.)

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

In the last few weeks, various segments of the U.S. media, and some mostly out-of-office politicians, have been agitating for the release of a suppressed 28-page segment of the joint Congressional inquiry into the 9/11/01 attacks in the U.S. that dealt with Saudi Arabian connections to the alleged al-Qaeda kamikaze plane hijackers. Rupert Murdoch's Fox "News" has had it's ranters jabbering away about the outrage of withholding the section, how the government is covering up. (But for some easy-to-guess reason they didn't once say "Bush," even though he was the president at the time, the guy who insisted on "classifying" the part of the report that damns the Saudi regime, the guy who fought against even having an investigating commission, and tried to put Henry Kissinger at its helm, and insisted that he and Cheney not testify under oath, and obstructed the commission in myriad ways. I'm sure many viewers had the impression it was all Obama's doing- after all, who personifies "the government" now?) John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan regime and member of the 9/11 Commission (separate from the Congressional inquiry) has called for the release of information on the Saudi government connection. Various other media commentators besides Murdoch's minions have similarly raised the issue.

For several years former Florida Senator Bob Graham has been pushing to get more information about the Saudi government connection to the al-Qaeda kamikaze attack of September 11, 2001, into the public domain. He has been in a tug-of-war with the FBI secret police agency, which, apparently following orders from first the Bush regime and now Obama, stubbornly refuses to divulge anything and rudely rebuffed Graham as a crank. [1]

This issue is currently getting new traction because a lawsuit by relatives of some of those killed on September 11, 2001, against the Saudi Arabian regime for its complicity in the attacks on the buildings, A previous lawsuit against the Saudis was dismissed by the U.S. courts. What is different now is a change in the political climate.

The Obama regime supposedly is poised to (very reluctantly) dribble out some bits of the suppressed 28-pages from the Congressional inquiry. [2]
The chair and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former right-wing Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton (a past veteran of whitewashes) have suddenly piped up to tell people not to pay much mind to those 28-pages in the Congressional inquiry because the 9/11 Commission checked all that out and there was just one low-level Saudi contact with the hijackers. Which is a rather odd stance for them to take, because after the Commission issued its report, the two of them wrote a book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, in which they say the Commission was "set up to fail"! So then, what makes you guys think you got to the bottom of things, hmmm? These guys write that the lies of the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration were so persistent that they toyed with the idea of doing an investigation of obstruction of justice by officials from those bodies. (But they punked out, of course. Lifelong made members of the establishment nomenklatura rarely sacrifice their privileges, status, and precious "reputations" for such fluff as morality, ethics, truth, justice, yadda yadda yadda.) [3]
It has long been known that Saudi diplomats and agents provided funds to the airplane hijackers. It is also no secret that the Bush regime barred the FBI from questioning numerous Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, and that an exception to the grounding of airline flight was made to hustle the Saudis out of the country in the days after 9/11/01.

As I mentioned, Bush and Cheney refused to provide testimony to the 9/11 Commission under oath. In other words, they wanted the freedom to lie.

The month before 9/11, the so-called "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested in Minnesota after arousing suspicion in his flight-training school. He was pretext-charged with an immigration violation and held. The French secret police had informed the Americans that he was a "terrorist."

The FBI field office in Minnesota asked Washington FBI headquarters to obtain a FISA court warrant for Mousaoui's computer, and was refused, with the incredible excuse that the court would not grant such a warrant. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act "court" virtually never refuses warrant requests.) Moussaoui is a French national.

Two of the hijackers lived in San Diego, California, in the home of an FBI informer. After 9/11, the FBI refused to present the informer and his FBI handler to Congress for questioning.

The CIA tracked some of the hijackers into the U.S. and kept this secret from the FBI and from Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council in the White House.

On the day of the attack the FBI immediately fingered 19 men as hijackers aboard the planes. A pristine passport for one of them magically survived the fireball and inferno of the plane crashing into one of the towers and was "found" on the ground.

These and numerous other facts indicate that the secret police were running a conspiracy to allow the attacks to occur.

But it's worse than that.

Overwhelming proof of the fact that three buildings in lower Manhattan were demolished by planted nano-thermite explosives is contained in a series of videos, ranging in length from a few minutes to over 2 hours, available on youtube. These explosives could only have been implanted, a process that would have taken days, by agents of the U.S. government. This was an act of high treason and fascist terrorism, designed to provoke an emotional reaction in the public that would be used by the culprits for their own political ends. 9/11 has elements of the JFK assassination, the Reichstag fire, and Operation Gladio rolled into one. [4]
It appears that the organizers of this conspiracy (which included Richard Cheney and to some unknown extent George Bush and other members of his family with close Saudi connections) intuited that the idea of such a crime would be literally unbelievable to people, and thus not comprehensible. Which is how they planned to get away with it. But the physical (and other) evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable. (Go watch the videos.) It would be physically impossible for even one of those three buildings to collapse straight down into their own footprints, at free fall rate, because planes crashed into two of them, as experienced architects and engineers know and explain.

That's why I say exposing the Saudi connection, pulling on that thread, is a dangerous act for establishment types, who apparently still don't comprehend the truth of the matter.

My theory is the Bush clan, with its close Saudi connections, was tipped to the al-Qaeda plot by the Saudi regime. Doubtless Saudi "intelligence" had long infiltrated al-Qaeda from its birth in the anti-Soviet Afghan war, when the U.S., Saudis, Pakistan, and various jihadists including Osama bin Laden were all on the same side.

The Bush-Cheney regime and elements within the Deep State of the secret police and military saw an opportunity to create the "second Pearl Harbor" they needed to carry out their long-standing goal of invading Iraq to replace Saddam Hussein, and ramming through police state laws greatly increasing the power of the secret police agencies (something Bill Clinton and then-Senator Joseph Biden tried and failed to do.

As a side note, I suspect the journalist Michael Hastings may have been murdered for pursuing the demolition of the World Trade Center buildings.

Now the Saudis are threatening to sell out their hoard of U.S. Treasury bonds if their role is dragged into the open. This rather hysterical response is an indication of guilt. If they aren't guilty, they would just defend themselves in court against the lawsuit by the victims' families.

9/11 is the story of a conspiracy wrapped around a conspiracy. The conspiracy by al-Qaeda was used as an element in a larger conspiracy enveloping it that took advantage of the much smaller conspiracy for its own ends. Both conspiracies achieved their aims. And while Osama bin Laden, coming from an engineering and construction family, probably understood that it wasn't the hijacked planes that caused the spectacular collapse of the towers, letting the credit/blame fall on him and al-Qaeda suited his interests. It made him and his organization appear fearsome and potent, it inspired and galvanized jihadists, and it provoked an attack by the U.S. Bin Laden's strategy was to provoke a war between the Western world and Sunni Muslim fundamentalism, as he made quite clear. Jihadists having beaten the Soviets, bin Laden was overconfident. Perhaps he forgot that the U.S. had his back in that war. In any event, the U.S. is now stuck in a Middle East quagmire, so the final chapter hasn't been written yet. Now the U.S. is wrestling with an even more vicious and fanatical foe, ISIS. And the U.S. has squandered trillions of dollars, mortgaging its future, which is a victory for bin Laden.

"That experience and track record [of knowing "one another from years of rubbing shoulders"] provide those in the political world a working knowledge of whether candidates are true to their word, are willing to compromise, know the subject matter, can keep a confidence — all among the important things to weigh in making political judgments."

Really? These are mysteries about Trump?

There is a voluminous public record, now decades-long, that conclusively answers all these questions, as does Trump's ubiquitous public performances since last year.

True to his word? What is his word?His word is constantly changing. And he blatantly lies, denying he said things he's been recorded on video saying.

He has a history of double-crosses and broken promises. Then there was "Trump University," which defrauded thousands of people.

Saturday, May 14, 2016

Donald Trump should get along swimmingly with the Chinese autocrats should be become U.S. president. (That is, after he uses his amazing negotiating skills to tear up all the trade treaties with China and get better ones. Oh, and China's WTO deal too.) The Chinese rulers already put into effect one of his policy proposals, murdering the families of "terrorists." ("You have to take out their families," was part of what he said in a blood-curdling rant to the media.) Trump had in mind the families of ISIS members. For the Chinese rulers the terrorists are Uighurs (who are Muslims, as is ISIS) who fight back against Chinese repression with violent attacks.

To avenge a knife attack in September of 2015 that reportedly killed 50 Han Chinese, China committed a death squad raid in November, executing 17 Uighurs, including women and children thought to be the family of an alleged culprit. This occurred just weeks before Trump voiced his threat, raising the possibility that he got the idea from the Chinese. [1]

Trump is certainly amoral enough to commit such state crimes. And guess what? Obama has already established the precedent before either Trump or the Chinese, with his murder of the 16-year-old son of Anwar Al-Awlaki and the son's cousin and friends, in a drone attack on them as they ate by the side of the road, two weeks after killing the father in another drone attack.Which makes it passing strange that the establishment media acted as if Trump was advocating something new and surprising. Maybe they have amnesia. On purpose. [2]

The only public explanation ever for the murders of the teenagers that the Obama regime gave came informally from Obama henchman Robert Gibbs, when he was cornered by some young journalists and pressed on the matter. Namely, the Obama regime hated Anwar al-Awlaki, and thus was to blame for these U.S. murders. The way Gibbs phrased it also blamed the teenager for choosing a bad father. And I guess the other teens were guilty of being in the presence of a teen with a bad dad. [Here's the video of the despicable Gibbs.]So maybe Trump just cribbed the idea from the Obama regime, and naturally didn't want to give them credit, since running as a Republican requires demonizing all Democrats (but not, ironically, demonizing them for the actual evil they do).

2] There
were some ethical objections to these murders in certain more
thoughtful precincts of the bourgeois media. But given how little
commotion the murders created in the U.S., and how they are now
completely forgotten, one is forced to conclude that U.S. society is
gravely defective morally.

Lot of time spend doing this, unpaid. Since the secret police stole the irreplaceable videotapes of the musical performances of my friend, I have plenty of time to attack their stinking system that I would be spending watching, digitizing, and editing those tapes. I'll be sharing the 40 years of persecution at their hands with my readers, with revealing details about the illegal operations and methods of the FBI, CIA, and police. They even used Mossad agents against me. Seriously. I won't be holding anything back.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Bernard Sanders won big in West Virginia, to no avail. Hillary Clinton almost has enough delegates to clinch the party's nomination. Sanders as won in 19 states, Clinton in 23, but Clinton has hundreds of unelected so-called "superdelegates," Democratic party officials who in effect comprise a Clinton Machine, who are going to vote for her at the convention, cheering lustily in the process. Clinton only needs to win 14% of the remaining delegates at stake to put her over the top.

The Clintons have controlled the Democratic Party ever since Bill ran for president in 1992. Indeed, crucial to that takeover was his prominence in the "Democratic Leadership Council,' a right-wing cabal that operated like a communist party central committee, wielding power within the party.

Even though a Clinton hasn't been president for over 15 years, and a Democrat has occupied the White House for almost eight years now, the Clintons still control the undemocratic Democratic Party.

Ironically, the hard right-wing Republican Party is more democratic than the Democrats. A man loathed by party poohbahs, Donald Trump, is on track to win that party's presidential nomination, eliminating 16 competitors in the process (including the royalist Jeb Bush) by dint of winning the votes in the state primaries.

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

John McCain unwittingly planted some seeds of irony last year that have now sprouted. At the time, summer 2015, McCain openly bemoaned the xenophobic demagoguery of Donald Trump. Trump came to Arizona, McCain's state, to do some rabble-rousing among white racists, towing behind him as a stage prop the father of a person murdered by an undocumented (aka “illegal”) immigrant. [1]

The political mobilization of white racist xenophobes in Arizona presented a threat to McCain, because of his vulnerability to an extremist far-rightwing challenger in the Republican primary for his U.S. Senate seat. (U.S. Senate terms last 6 years, and McCain is running for reelection for a 6th term this November.)

McCain fretted of Trump's agitprop rally that “This performance with our friend out in Phoenix is very hurtful to me. Because what he did was he fired up the crazies.” “We have a very extreme element within our Republican Party,” in Arizona. “Now he galvanized them. He’s really got them activated.”

These are the comments that irked the schoolyard bully Trump, prompting him to denigrate McCain for only being called a hero for being “captured,” making McCain a “loser” in Trump's eyes. (As Trump avoided the draft, and certainly didn't volunteer, he was never in any danger of capture and possible Loserhood himself. It was mostly the poor and other lower economic classes who were subjected to impressment into the U.S. military to attack Indochina. McCain was descended from a military family and entered the U.S. Naval Academy to pursue a career as a navy officer, later finding politics more to his taste.)

Now here are some excerpts from an article in a haute bourgeois U.S. publication that ran in July of last year. I have highlighted certain phrases:

McCain is an ardent backer of his good friend Senator
Lindsey Graham, who is languishing in the G.O.P. Presidential primary
polls. He noted that Graham has been one of the few Republicans to
condemn Trump in strong terms. On Sunday, Graham said on
CNN, “I think [Trump]’s a wrecking ball for the future of the
Republican Party with the Hispanic community, and we need to push
back.” He added that Republicans “need to reject this
demagoguery. If we don’t, we will lose, and we will deserve to
lose.”

McCain, who is
eighteen years older than Graham, sounded like a proud father.
“Lindsey said this is a moral test for our party. He put on a
very strong performance,” McCain said. “Of course, Lindsey
was one of the eight of us who negotiated immigration reform. Lindsey
never backed away from it.”McCain, who had a testy relationship with Senator Marco
Rubio, another member of the Gang of Eight who is running for
President, couldn’t resist adding, “Rubio backed away from it.”

I noted that Rubio, like many other Republican
politicians, has been hard to follow on the issue and no longer
supports the compromise approach that the Gang of Eight took in 2013:
combining a pathway to citizenship and tough new border measures in a
single bill. McCain licked his finger, held it up in the air, and
laughed.

“You know that old song from before you were born?” McCain
said, speaking of the Bob Dylan classic “Subterranean
Homesick Blues.” “You don’t need a weatherman to know
which way the wind blows.” [2]

Indeed.

So McCain, who hops on the Trump
bandwagon, laughed at Rubio as someone who, like a weathervane,
points in whatever direction the political winds are blowing. Note
that McCain's political compadre Graham, and the Bushes, and
Mitt Romney, and many other prominent Republicans, have publicly
disavowed Trump. And McCain said Amen to Graham's call to resist the
demagoguery of Trump. Not just as a political necessity, but as a
“moral test.”

As they say in those English-speaking
isles across the Atlantic, Cheers!

1] Trump and his ilk have been
raising a terrible stink about two murders committed by non-citizens
present in the U.S. without permission. Given that there are an
estimated 11 million such people here (out of an estimated population
of 315 million), no one should be shocked if some of them commit
murder. There were 16,121 homicides in the U.S. in 2013, according to the CDC. (Over two-thirds of the homicides were committed with
firearms, by the way.) Doubtless the vast majority were the crimes of
U.S. citizens. But of course racism and xenophobia are impervious to
rational thought, so this is a case of, in the immortal words of
Ronald Reagan, “facts are stupid things.”

Or in the satirical stylings of
comedian Steve Colbert, “truthiness” trumps mere truth. Because
emotions are stronger than reason, feelings are more vivid, thus
“truer,” than facts, which are intellectual abstractions. You
could say that much of the problems of humanity are rooted in this
basic structural and existential fact of the mind/psyche. We have
(some of us, anyway) rational capability, but it is very hard to be
rational, to live guided by reason.

Monday, May 09, 2016

U.S. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona is endorsing the man who sneered that McCain wasn't really a war hero, he was only a hero "because he was captured" and then gratuitously added "I like people that weren't captured," callously brushing aside with contempt McCain's five and a half years of captivity in Vietnam. I refer, of course, to one Donald J. Trump, Billionaire Narcissist, Sociopath, and Dangerous Demagogue. [1]

McCain has already been a Senator for almost 3 decades, and is 79 years old, yet is so desperate to stay in the Senate that he is willing to demean himself this way because, it was reported, he fears the white bigots (my term) who dominate Arizona politics (especially Republican primaries) and who are infatuated with Trump. (These are people he previously referred to as "crazies" being riled up by Trump, which provoked Trump The Bully to then piss on McCain's war record.) Even a militarist and hard right-winger like McCain fears being unseated by someone even more extreme in a GOP Senate primary.

McCain's inseparable partner in the Senate, Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina, won't endorse Trump because, he says, Trump called McCain "a
loser for being captured" and Trump said nice things about Vladimir
Putin, The Bogeyman of Russia.

McCain is a man who actually has already had some practice in pride-swallowing concomitant to hailing someone who humiliated him. In 2000 he ran against George W. "Warrior" Bush for the GOP presidential nomination. In order to destroy McCain in white racist South Carolina, the Bush gang, under the direction of the Machiavellian Karl Rove, spread the rumor that McCain had a secret, "illegitimate" black child. The "dirty trick" worked. Loser McCain fell in line behind Bush, ultimately. [2]

This is the man the corporate propaganda system dressed up for public
consumption as a "straight-shooter" and "maverick," a man who marched
to his own drummer.

If what it takes to be a Republican Senator is this sort of self-abnegation, then the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) must be recognized as having cultlike properties, forcing its acolytes to surrender their self-respect in return for acceptance by the group and for power. (The classic existential situation of selling one's soul to the devil for temporal gain.)In placeof self-respect is substituted ersatz self-respect, namely arrogant self-regard, and vanity. These are brittle, shallow psychic properties which render the individual psychologically vulnerable, and thus even more manipulable by the cult.

This sacrifice of the human self in return for a share of power is a key mechanism by which anti-human power systems like the U.S. perpetuate themselves.

McCain was "heroic" enough to bomb the Vietnamese, which was immoral, but politically and ethically he's now proven himself to be a Profile in Cowardice.

John Sidney McCain III has been a U.S. Senator since January, 1987; 29 years. He will be 80 years old in August. Still, he apparently cannot abide the thought of leaving the Senate. McCain, it seems, is a man who will degrade himself in order to be a Senator for Life. [3]

1] Trump's classic sociopathic traits include his cunning instinct for homing in on others' vulnerabilities, and his indifference to the interests and feelings of others in pursuit of his own advancement.2] Yes, South Carolina is that racist. One would think that such a despicable ploy would boomerang on the perpetrators. Au contraire, mon amis! Nor do such tactics earn opprobrium from the Chatterocracy of the corporate propaganda system (aka "the media). Hell, if treasonous actions such as Nixon sabotaging the Paris peace talks between the U.S. and North Vietnam in 1968 (by advising South Vietnamese dictator Thieu to boycott them) and Reagan arranging for Iran to hold on to the "hostages" in 1980 until Carter's last day in office are kept "secret" with the connivance of the bourgeois blatherariat, what's a little sexual/racial smearing? It's not as if U.S. power elites have high ethical standards (their obnoxious pretentions to same notwithstanding). [The underhanded method Rove used to plant the idea of "McCain's illegitimate black daughter" in people's heads was a push poll. Lee Atwater was another GOP political thug who used the same technique in 1980.]

Bushis a war hero in his own right, having spent the Vietnam war in a safe stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard, secured for him by his daddy, a posting from which he went AWOL (absent without leave-that's military jargon). He also flew in a jet which landed on an aircraft carrier in 2003 and proclaimed Victory in the invasion of Iraq. ("Mission Accomplished," proclaimed a boastful banner suspended from the carrier's superstructure, photogenically strung behind the rostrum placed on the carrier deck from which Bush addressed the assembled sailors and airmen.)

Yet Bush's self-serving evasion of "service" to the murderous U.S. imperialist project in Indochina is far preferable to what McCain did. McCain was a very avid bomber of Vietnam, as we know from his own and
others' accounts. He asked for a combat assignment, and helped bomb
North Vietnam from a navy aircraft carrier as part of Operation Rolling
Thunder during the Johnson regime. After an accident on the carrier
injured him and put the ship out of action, he got himself transferred
to another carrier so he could keep bombing. Shot down over Hanoi on his
23rd bombing mission, he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured at
first. (Although what was done to him wouldn't be considered "torture"
if the U.S. were doing it to prisoners.)

3] McCain's father and grandfather both rose to the rank of 4-star admirals in the U.S. Navy. McCain, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at the bottom of his class, achieved the rank of captain, equivalent to a colonel in the other main three branches of the U.S. military (army, air force, and Marine Corps.).

"Now I'm endorsing HIM?? I'll do ANYTHING to stay a Senator until I die!"

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Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Obama, we've been told, has a bit of a mental itch. He's somewhat
obsessive about his "place in history." One legacy he's been busily
building during his term is murder. To be sure, he's murdered fewer
people than his predecessor, Bush the Younger. And I'm not implying that
every killing has been a murder. Some could be justified as killing
combatants or their commanders in various (not officially declared) wars
the U.S. is waging. Some have been flat-out murders, as the
assassination of the son and nephews of al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar
al-Awlaki.

Now there must be added to the tally of skulls on Obama's escutcheon over3,000
Yemeni civilians. (I'm excluding another 3,000 Yemenis who are Houthi
tribesmen and alleged armed combatants.) These numbers are from the UN
and from Human Rights Watch, and I haven't heard them contested. They
were killed with U.S.-supplied bombs, including vicious cluster bombs,
dropped from U.S.-supplied planes, on markets, on apartment buildings,
on mosques, and on hospitals.The planes and bombs were purchased by
Saudi Arabia and its fellow Arabian peninsula oiligarchies from the U.S.
U.S. officers are stationed in Saudi military headquarters passing
along target locations. U.S. aerial refueling tankers fly with the Arab
warplanes so they can carry out their missions.

Obama
has authorized the sale of tens of billions of dollars of munitions and
weapons, including to feed the Saudi war machine's attack on Yemen.

This
is one murderous legacy the U.S. media will be sure to ignore in the
future. The only crime of a U.S. president that media is willing to
acknowledge is the burglary of the Democratic National Committee
headquarters in Washington, D.C., by Nixon's burglars, the so-called
"plumbers," fascist CIA veterans. (Including one of the assassins of
Nixon's hated predecessor and rival, John F. Kennedy, namely E. Howard
Hunt.)

French President François Hollande* announced yesterday "As things stand in the international trade negotiations, the French position is 'no'," Hollande proclaimed in a speech in Paris. (That's non in French.) Hollande dressed the move up in the garb of high principle, namely the need to defend French culture. Other "principles" enumerated were protection of the environment and of French agricultural interests. (French farming probably wouldn't exist without protectionism. Notice how in the context of current U.S.-capitalist ideology, "protectionism" is a dirty word? Since when is protecting something bad? "Protecting American interests" on the other hand, is a GOOD thing. What's unsaid is that "American interests" consist of U.S. state power, and big corporate business interests, NOT the interests of most Americans. Maybe someday they will realize that.)Earlier in the day, French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl signaled what was coming, saying a halt in the trade talks was likely. France has been complaining about the stubbornness and inflexibility of the U.S. position. The move followed on the heels of the environmental activist group Greenpeace releasing 248 pages of the latest secret negotiating text of a
trade deal the U.S. is trying to shove down the throat of the European Union. The proposed treaty is grandly titled the "
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership," or TTIP to political sophisticates. The documents show the U.S. predictably pressuring European
countries to rip holes in their environmental and consumer protections, and to give giant corporations even more
power during trade talks. They also expose yet another double-cross by Obama, who in public always claims he's interested in protecting workers, consumers, and the environment. [1]The French public, already deeply dubious of a "free trade" treaty in the mold of the notorious predecessors NAFTA**, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and others of that ilk, were aroused by the Greenpeace expose. Hollande doubtless behaved as a political weather vane, blowing with the prevailing winds of public opinion, rather than a stalwart defender of principle. Oh, did I mention there's a French election next year, and Hollande is very unpopular already? Not that it's relevant, oh no. [2]So what has that to do with the upcoming June UK public referendum on exiting the European Union, so-called Brexit, or British exit? Obama, a few weeks ago when he was in Britain (according to him, he flew all the way there just to wish the "Queen" Happy Birthday- I suppose after he leaves the White House he'll be selling the Brooklyn Bridge to some suckers) writing a column (in the reactionary rag TheTelegraph) and making public pronouncements and giving interviews urging the British public to stay in the EU, he make a bit of a threat, saying Britain would have to cool its heels at the back of the trade treaty line, after a deal was cut with the EU. [3]Well, the EU just left the line.That means that the country that apparently can't chew gum and walk at the same time can impose a bad trade deal to Britain. Unless the trade deal window is closed for lunch.* Hollande's full name is actually François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande. I guess that's so in case he loses a few names, he'll have spares on hand.** NAFTA stands for North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal between the U.S., Mexico, an Canada, crafted to put big corporations in the economic driver's seat, that has devastated workers in the U.S. and farmers in Mexico, and helped lead to the forced migration of millions of Mexicans to the U.S. to seek employment, driving down wages in America.

1] There's some irony in Greenpeace being the bearer of information to the French public that forced Hollande's hand, as in 1985 a previous French president with too many names, the horrid François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, ordered French frogmen to blow up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, which was interfering with French nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific, spreading radiation and thus vandalizing the human genome. The terrorist bombing murdered a young photographer and father of two young children, inflicting a lifelong psychic wound on them and their mother. See "Russia Outdoes U.S. Five-Fold In Bombing Hospitals," paragraph 3, and footnote 3.

2] The reactionary Wall Street Journal saw shades of the Munich sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in Hollande's move:"Hollande: France Won’t Compromise Principles in Trans-Atlantic Trade Talks- A year ahead of presidential elections, Hollande is looking to appease many on the left suspicious of a trade deal,"May 3, 2016. The word "appease" has a negative connotation in U.S. political discourse as the word appeasement is habitually used to make invidious comparisons to the infamous 1938 sellout of Britain and France to Hitler.

French President François Hollande* announced yesterday "As things stand in the international trade negotiations, the French position is 'no'," Hollande proclaimed in a speech in Paris. (That's non in French.) Hollande dressed the move up in the garb of high principle, namely the need to defend French culture. Other "principles" enumerated were protection of the environment and of French agricultural interests. (French farming probably wouldn't exist without protectionism. Notice how in the context of current U.S.-capitalist ideology, "protectionism" is a dirty word? Since when is protecting something bad? "Protecting American interests" on the other hand, is a GOOD thing. What's unsaid is that "American interests" consist of U.S. state power, and big corporate business interests, NOT the interests of most Americans. Maybe someday they will realize that.)Earlier in the day, French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl signaled what was coming, saying a halt in the trade talks was likely. France has been complaining about the stubbornness and inflexibility of the U.S. position. The move followed on the heels of the environmental activist group Greenpeace releasing 248 pages of the latest secret negotiating text of a
trade deal the U.S. is trying to shove down the throat of the European Union. The proposed treaty is grandly titled the "
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership," or TTIP to political sophisticates. The documents show the U.S. predictably pressuring European
countries to rip holes in their environmental and consumer protections, and to give giant corporations even more
power during trade talks. They also expose yet another double-cross by Obama, who in public always claims he's interested in protecting workers, consumers, and the environment. [1]The French public, already deeply dubious of a "free trade" treaty in the mold of the notorious predecessors NAFTA**, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and others of that ilk, were aroused by the Greenpeace expose. Hollande doubtless behaved as a political weather vane, blowing with the prevailing winds of public opinion, rather than a stalwart defender of principle. Oh, did I mention there's a French election next year, and Hollande is very unpopular already? Not that it's relevant, oh no. [2]So what has that to do with the upcoming June UK public referendum on exiting the European Union, so-called Brexit, or British exit? Obama, a few weeks ago when he was in Britain (according to him, he flew all the way there just to wish the "Queen" Happy Birthday- I suppose after he leaves the White House he'll be selling the Brooklyn Bridge to some suckers) writing a column (in the reactionary rag TheTelegraph) and making public pronouncements and giving interviews urging the British public to stay in the EU, he make a bit of a threat, saying Britain would have to cool its heels at the back of the trade treaty line, after a deal was cut with the EU. [3]Well, the EU just left the line.That means that the country that apparently can't chew gum and walk at the same time can impose a bad trade deal to Britain. Unless the trade deal window is closed for lunch.* Hollande's full name is actually François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande. I guess that's so in case he loses a few names, he'll have spares on hand.** NAFTA stands for North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal between the U.S., Mexico, an Canada, crafted to put big corporations in the economic driver's seat, that has devastated workers in the U.S. and farmers in Mexico, and helped lead to the forced migration of millions of Mexicans to the U.S. to seek employment, driving down wages in America.

1] There's some irony in Greenpeace being the bearer of information to the French public that forced Hollande's hand, as in 1985 a previous French president with too many names, the horrid François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterrand, ordered French frogmen to blow up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, which was interfering with French nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific, spreading radiation and thus vandalizing the human genome. The terrorist bombing murdered a young photographer and father of two young children, inflicting a lifelong psychic wound on them and their mother. See "Russia Outdoes U.S. Five-Fold In Bombing Hospitals," paragraph 3, and footnote 3.

2] The reactionary Wall Street Journal saw shades of the Munich sellout of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in Hollande's move:"Hollande: France Won’t Compromise Principles in Trans-Atlantic Trade Talks- A year ahead of presidential elections, Hollande is looking to appease many on the left suspicious of a trade deal,"May 3, 2016. The word "appease" has a negative connotation in U.S. political discourse as the word appeasement is habitually used to make invidious comparisons to the infamous 1938 sellout of Britain and France to Hitler.

Monday, May 02, 2016

U.S. president Barack "DroneMan" Obama saw fit to stick his snout into domestic British politics by lobbying the British public on How To Vote in the upcoming referendum on continuing membership in the European Union (EU). British exit, referred to as "Brexit" for British exit, would be a big mistake, so Obama has been schooling the British public in media interviews, public statements, and guess columns in at least one British newspaper. [1]

Most of Obama's arguments were economic, along with a trade threat- namely that Britain would be at the back of the line in negotiating a trade deal with the U.S. (You see, the U.S. government, despite the trillions of dollars and millions of personnel at its disposal, cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. Negotiate TWO trade deals at once? Clearly impossible! This is a sleepy bureaucracy. One at a time please.)

Then, in a BBC interview a few days ago, Obama gave another reason why Britain must stay in the EU to make itself useful to the U.S.: to influence EU policy on surveillance and privacy.

The EU is slightly interested in protecting at least some privacy for its citizens, and has some weak, poorly enforced rules to that effect. Britain, on the other hand, is a privacy Holocaust-land, like the U.S. (London, like New York and other U.S. cities, is honeycombed with many thousands of surveillance cameras in a simulacrum of the nightmarish world of George Orwell's 1984.) And the UK is one of the so-called "Five Eyes," the five English-language Anglo-Saxon dominated nations that have electronic spying agencies tightly tied to the NSA, the so-called "National Security Agency," a military body. (The five are the U.S. Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) Their targets include their own populations, and continental Europe's, as well as anyone and everyone on earth they can eavesdrop on.

Obama piously opined that he just wanted to make sure the EU struck the proper "balance" between "security" and "privacy." This is an act he has put on ever since Edward Snowden exposed Obama as one of the worst violators of privacy and the Bill of Rights "guarantees" in U.S. history. As so often with Obama, his actions are the exact opposite of his mendacious words. To him, the proper "balance" is 100% for state spying and zero for citizen privacy. That is his actual practice.

It is very obvious that American politicians, with only a small minority as exceptions, only care about increasing the power of the state, at the expense of the citizens, who are made ever more vulnerable and exposed to malevolent targeting by government apparatchiks. (I have over 40 years of personal experience in this regard, unfortunately.) The U.S. power system has done a good job of keeping its ubiquitous surveillance, and its victims, invisible. As long as the number of people who feel themselves directly impacted is a small proportion of the total population, those in power figure they can continue to get away with it. On the other hand, large U.S. tech companies are faced with a loss of overseas business, hence the public displays of pushback by the likes of Apple and other tech companies.

It's a sad day when the most consequential resistance to the repressive U.S. state comes from large corporations! The interests of the corporate sector and the U.S. state are usually in sync, or when not, the government defers to the corporations. The Supreme Court commonly sides with large corporations in cases versus the U.S. government. Right now, the secret police sector, led by the FBI and their nominal master, the Department of "Justice" (the FBI-DO"J" relationship is often one of the tail wagging the dog), is pushing to make tech companies subservient to the secret police. The recent trumped-up case over an Apple iPhone 5, used by one of the San Bernardino mass murderers, was a salvo in that campaign. (The FBI pretended it needed Apple to create an encryption-breaking tool, which was false. Politicians and media stooges of the secret police sector all attacked Apple. Even the "progressive" mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, piled on Apple.)

Some other Big Lies of Obama and the U.S. political and media classes are worth mentioning in this context, in the interest of promoting mental hygiene.

-Snowden could and should have worked within proper channels:

Numerous whistleblowers who did just that have been crucified during the Obama regime, including NSA veterans William Binney, who for his troubles got an FBI raid on his home complete with an FBI agent sticking a gun in his face while in the shower, and Thomas Drake, indicted with the use of government-forged documents.

-Spying is overseen by Congress and the courts, as well as by the executive branch:

This was one of Obama's lines. Well of course Obama conspired to keep it secret, and approved the expansion of the massive police state. The "judicial oversight" consists of the rubber-stamp "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" (FISA) "court," which are hand-picked reactionary judges whose sole function is to rubber-stamp warrants. (They've granted over 40,000, and rejected about a dozen that had paperwork errors. Even that "court" grumbled that the NSA went far beyond what the court's warrants granted.)

The Congressional "oversight" consists of just those Congresspeople on the "Intelligence" committees of the House and Senate, who are legally prohibited from informing the rest of Congress about what's going on, as it's all "classified." Furthermore, they are in the dark and even blatantly lied to, as Obama's "Director of National Security" James Clapper notoriously did (you can view him lying to the committee on youtube.com) and NSA bosses Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden. Furthermore, the various secret police agencies spy on the committees, such as whe the CIA broke into the computers of committee staffers reviewing the CIA's torture program. So who is overseeing whom?

-Only metadata is collected by the NSA:

This lie is assiduously and relentlessly repeated not only by all the awful politicians of both parties, from Obama on down, but by the mendacious U.S. corporate media. The 30-year NSA veteran William Binney has said numerous times in public forums that the NSA is collecting the content of phone calls, emails, etc., not just metadata. Not that we need him to tell us. The fact that the NSA just built a gigantic storage center in Utah, that can store data equivalent to 100,000 Libraries of Congress, and is now building another storage center, makes it obvious that they aren't just storing metadata, which take up no more room than a small text file per message.

-It's all "legal:"

Well, if the criminals are the ones "interpreting" the law.

The U.S. Constitution is the basic law of the land, the foundation of all other laws. At least that's what they claim. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is quite specific:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place
to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Clearly, sweeping up every single communication of millions of people at once, not to mention rummaging through the bank, medical, library, and every other kind of record, ( the FBI alone has seized hundreds of thousands of those types of
records using the "PATRIOT" Act as an excuse- are there really so many
"terrorists" here?) turns the Fourth Amendment "guarantee" into confetti.

"The Free World" should surely be recognized by now as the cynical Orwellian slogan that it is.

NPR "national political correspondent" Don Gonyea says Trump might have "momentum" going into the Indiana party primary, as he leads Ted Cruz by 15 percentage points.

So with Trump on the verge of either obtaining a majority of delegates to the party convention or nearly so, a U.S. reporter uses the "M" word. (NPR is the domestic radio propaganda network started by the U.S. government and funded in part by corporate advertising.)